1. Field of the Invention
The present invention provides an apparatus and a method capable of determining the material of a printing media, and in particular, an apparatus and a method that detects reflected light from the printing media to form an image, and analyzes the image to determine the material of the printing media. Furthermore, the present invention also introduces an ink jet printer that applies the disclosed apparatus and the method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a general case, when a printer prints a media, a notable quality difference will exist between different materials. With an ink jet printer for example, photo paper has good performance but the pattern on normal paper is often blurred due to ink spread. Before printing, users have to manually set the material and type setting of printing media at such as photo paper, normal paper, or a slide etc. The printer adjusts the ink jet head to jet ink at a suitable speed and amount according to the material parameter set by users, in order to achieve the best print performance. If the material and type of printing media is not set before printing, bad print performance may occur. While it is possible to reprint when a bad print performance occurs, this is inconvenient and inefficient, and results in meaningless paper waste.
In the related art, a plurality of light sources and a light receiver (or a light source and a plurality of light receivers) are utilized to receive reflected light and transmission light from the printing media and then compare the light vectors at a co-ordinate axis in order to analyze the material of the printing media. Another method locates a rotatable circular wheel that includes a fillister behind the printing media, and determines the material of the printing media through monitoring a pattern generated by the reflected light from the circular wheel. The methods discussed above require complex mechanical structures and devices to obtain the desired result, resulting in high manufacturing costs.